The Contributions of Computer Music Pioneer Knut Wiggen

Knut Wiggen (1927-2016) was active in Stockholm as director of the concert organization Fylkingen (1959-69) and as the founding director of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) (1964-75). These positions gave him enormous influence in Swedish contemporary music at the time, but following his departure, his achievements were quickly abandoned when the studio changed focus towards more conventional tape-based composition. The reasons for this abrupt change have previously been discussed, as has the broader outlines of his work,[1] and recent research has focused on the thoughts that guided his entire development of the hybrid studio and resulted in his radical composition software MusicBox.[2] MusicBox has not previously been presented for the computer music community, much due to the fact that EMS discontinued the development upon Wiggen's departure in 1975, and because Wiggen brought the code with him when he left. This article describes Wiggen's achievements in an international perspective, and gives an overview of the composition method employed in MusicBox in one of his published musical studies. A more detailed analysis can be found in [3]. The consequent radicalism in Wiggen's thinking is striking, as is his understanding of why new technology needed to be appropriated in the arts, and if this presentation helps lifting Wiggen's contributions from obscurity into the canon of early computer music pioneers, it has been successful.